Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

socioeconomic base.

Whah-hey!

The principle of distribution according to need precludes the

conversion of products into goods and their conversion

into value.

Och aye!

The objective conditions for the transfer to socialism can

only—

‘Enough,’ I said – though now I wish I had let him go on a bit. It was easy to joke about Communism. That was one of the things the Russians, too, had always done about Communism. On the other hand you could serve years for joking about Communism, under Communism (as Tibor knew). Joke. Q: Why are the USSR and America the same? A: Because in the USSR you can joke about America and in America you can joke about America.

During the mid-1970s I worked for the famous and historic and now perhaps obsolescent Labour weekly, the New Statesman (or the NEW STATESMAN, in its own house style). [4] The New Statesman was founded in 1913 by, among others (and the others included Maynard Keynes), the century’s four most extravagant dupes of the USSR: H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Wells, after an audience with Stalin in 1934, said that he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest’; these attributes accounted for ‘his remarkable ascendancy over the country since no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him’. Shaw, after some banquet diplomacy, declared the Russian people uncommonly well-fed at a time when perhaps 11 million citizens (Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia , 1917–1991) were in the process of dying of starvation. The Webbs, after extensive study, wrote a book which, ‘seen as the last word in serious Western scholarship, ran to over 1,200 pages, representing a vast amount of toil and research, all totally wasted. It was originally entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? , but the question mark was triumphantly removed in the second edition – which appeared in 1937 at precisely the time the regime was in its worst phase’ (Conquest). Sidney and Beatrice Webb swallowed the great Show Trials of 1936–38, and the New Statesman was not much less sceptical: ‘We do not deny… that the confessions may have contained a substratum of truth’; ‘there had undoubtedly been much plotting in the USSR’; and so on. My contemporaries there were Julian Barnes (novelist and critic), Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, political man of letters), and James Fenton (journalist, critic, essayist and, above all, poet). Politically we broke down as follows. Julian was broadly Labour – though Christopher Hitchens would tirelessly ridicule him for having once voted Liberal. I was quietist and unaligned. Fenton and Hitchens, on the other hand, were proselytizing Trotskyists who (for instance) spent their Saturdays selling copies of the Socialist Worker on impoverished London high streets.

‘What do I call you if I write this piece?’ I said to Christopher, on the phone to him in Washington, D.C. ‘Trotskyites or Trotskyists?’

‘Oh, Trotskyists. Only a Stalinist would have called us Trotskyites.’

I laughed. I laughed indulgently. We talked on.

At the New Statesman in the mid-1970s we used to argue about Communism. I was unaligned, but I was, in a sense, a congenital anti-Communist, inoculated not at birth but at the age of six or seven, in 1956, when the Amises settled into honest atheism with the Labour Party. And, anyway, the argument was surely all over now, with the publication, in 1973 and 1975, of the first two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago . Upstairs, in the literary department, we had published a review of Volume Two, by V. S. Pritchett, beautifully and (to me) unforgettably entitled ‘When We Dead Awaken’. Pritchett’s piece ended: ‘[Solzhenitsyn] is not a political; he is without rhetoric or doublethink; he is an awakener.’ When We Dead Awaken: yes, I thought. That is the next thing now… And it hasn’t happened. In the general consciousness the Russian dead sleep on.

Hitchens and I used to argue about Communism in the corridors, sporadically, semi-seriously. The fascist novelist John Braine (proletarian, northern, monotonously drunken, and ridiculously influential, socioculturally but not politically, for at least a generation) used to say to left-wingers: ‘Why do you love despotism? Why do you yearn for tyranny?’ And this was more or less the question I put to the Hitch:

‘Rule by yobs. That’s what you want. Why?’

‘Yup. Rule by yobs. What I want is the berks in the saddle. Rule by yobs.’

These exchanges took place in a spirit of humorous appraisal, mutual appraisal. We were not quite yet the best friends we would become, and politics was part of the distance between us. Rule by yobs, incidentally, or the dictatorship of the proletariat (an outcome only academically entertained by the Bolsheviks), provided the flavour of the superficial and temporary rearrangement taking place in England then: the transfer of wealth, as the Labour Party put it, to the working classes and their families. I was partly going with the culture, perhaps, but this idea (with 99 per cent income tax in the top bracket, etc.) so little offended me that I too voted for the continuation of Labour policies. Or I tried. On General Election day in 1978 my brother and I (Labour) agreed, in the fascist mansion, to stay at home and swap votes with two in situ Conservatives. The Conservatives (we felt) pretended to misunderstand this arrangement and drove off to vote in my step-uncle’s car: a fascist Jaguar. (‘That’s four votes you cheated us out of,’ I said with some heat to my step-uncle. ‘No. Two votes,’ he corrected.) Meanwhile, the social effect of trade-union – they used to say trades-union – ascendancy was everywhere apparent. And profound and retroactive. It made me believe that the people of these islands had always hated each other. And this isn’t true. The hatred, the universal disobligingness, was a political deformation, and it didn’t last.

James Fenton said little during these semi-serious disputes, although they often took place in his office (which was always incredibly tidy, with no more than a lone paper clip on the whole sweep of the desk. Julian’s desk was incredibly tidy, also featuring the lone paper clip. My desk was a haystack. Christopher’s desk was a haystack. ‘You and Christopher ought to get married,’ said James resignedly. He was best friends with Christopher, too. And they shared the politics.) James said little during these disputes. Like Christopher, he saw no hope in the ‘actually existing’ socialism of the USSR, and actively opposed it. Very roughly, their political faith imagined a return to the well of revolutionary energy through the figure of Trotsky, that great eidolon of thwarted possibility. James had had his counter-experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia. But I wondered how he felt, qua poet, about the place of art in a socialist state; and, I thought, he must hate the language , the metallic clichés, the formulas and euphemisms, the supposedly futuristic and time-thrifty acronyms and condensations. [5] What Nabokov characterizes as the Com-pom-poms – Sovnarkom and Narkomindel, and so on; the state liquor monopoly was called Soyuzsprit; the agency shunting the Mandelstams around in the early 1920s was unencouragingly known as Centroevac. Once, when we had a solemn lunch together, James formulated his (local) position as follows: ‘I want a Labour government that is weak against the trade unions.’ And England, I unelegiacally thought, was going to get that kind of government. This was the future, and it was Left.

So on the phone, the other day, I said to Christopher, ‘We’ll have to have a long talk about this.’